Posts Tagged ‘fingerings’

I first pub­lished my own bas­soon fin­ger­ing charts a lit­tle over two years ago. That post is far and away the most pop­u­lar on this site, and I’ve heard reports from all over of peo­ple using the charts. It was always my inten­tion to tweak the charts as I used them for teach­ing and received feed­back from oth­er users. But I lost my source files short­ly after pub­lish­ing the first charts, and have only been able to make very minor changes since then. Now, final­ly, I’ve rebuilt the things from the ground up and made some alter­ations that were long over­due.

The charts show my basic fingering(s) for each note. I may at some point add charts for alter­nate fin­ger­ings and/or trills, but they aren’t there yet. There are now four sep­a­rate ver­sions of my fin­ger­ing chart, suit­able for dif­fer­ent uses:

The Begin­ner Chart includes fin­ger­ings for the first three octaves of the bas­soon (Bb1—Bb4), uses only bass clef, and shows vent­ing rather than flick­ing.

The Stu­dent Chart extends up to E5, uses tenor clef, and shows flick­ing keys in red.

The Pro Chart goes all the way up to Bb5 for the adven­tur­ous

The Extreme Range Chart just shows the very top end of my fin­ger­ings, for those who don’t need any help in the stan­dard range

The charts now reside on their own sep­a­rate page under my Resources tab. That way I can just post future updates there with­out hav­ing to make a new post every time. Grab them here: Fin­ger­ing Charts.

Although I’ve set out all of my basic fin­ger­ings in my fin­ger­ing charts, from time to time I find myself want­i­ng to make note of an eas­i­er way to pro­duce a par­tic­u­lar trill, spe­cial fin­ger­ings for har­mon­ics or mul­ti­phon­ics, or a new alter­nate fin­ger­ing I’ve learned from a col­league. To make this eas­i­er, I whipped up a print­able blank fin­ger­ing chart that makes it easy to jot down a fin­ger­ing quick­ly and leg­i­bly. The staves are com­plete­ly emp­ty so that you can write notes in any clef, and the blank fin­ger­ing dia­grams are once again cour­tesy of Bret Pimentel’s Fin­ger­ing Dia­gram Builder. I hope you’ll find this to be use­ful, too!

A cou­ple of weeks ago, I start­ed teach­ing a high school vio­list who decid­ed that she’d like to play the bas­soon. Not know­ing if she’d got­ten her hands on a fin­ger­ing chart or not, I decid­ed to take one to her les­son. I have quite a few charts lying around, but as I looked through them, I real­ized that I didn’t com­plete­ly agree with any of them, at least not for use by a begin­ning stu­dent. I end­ed up tak­ing her a copy of a chart that I’d got­ten from the Conn-Selmer web site, but only after I’d marked it all up with a pen. It turned out that she did have a fin­ger­ing chart already, but I didn’t com­plete­ly agree with it, either. As I was dri­ving home from her first les­son, I thought to myself how sil­ly it is to give a stu­dent a fin­ger­ing chart that I’ve marked all over, espe­cial­ly since this cer­tain­ly isn’t the first time I’ve done so. I resolved then and there that I’d make my own fin­ger­ing chart.

Awhile ago, I’d come across the very cool and well-thought-out Fin­ger­ing Dia­gram Builder built by Bret Pimentel, mul­ti­ple-wood­winds teacher at Delta State Uni­ver­si­ty. (You can read more about the FDB here). But until now, I hadn’t done any more than just play around with it. I used Bret’s FDB to crank out an image for each of my basic fin­ger­ings. I includ­ed my most com­mon alter­nate fin­ger­ings, but didn’t get into slur, mut­ed, trill, or oth­er vari­a­tions.

Once I had all of the images, I had to decide how best to lay them out with­in a score. I’ve been using Finale for years, but I’d recent­ly start­ed play­ing around with Lily­Pond. Lily­Pond is an open-source music engrav­ing pro­gram that pro­duces very nice-look­ing scores — far clos­er in appear­ance to good old-fash­ioned hand engrav­ing than Finale’s often jagged and weird­ly-spaced out­put. The down­side (if you choose to see it that way) is that Lily­Pond has no graph­i­cal user inter­face; it gen­er­ates scores from spe­cial­ly for­mat­ted text files, and is in that way more like a pro­gram­ming lan­guage than a tra­di­tion­al nota­tion pro­gram. But, I’d been look­ing for a project to under­take with Lily­Pond, and this seemed like just the thing.

It took awhile to get the hang of Lily­Pond, and some for­mat­ting things I only ever got by tri­al and error. But, I final­ly end­ed up with two ver­sions of my per­son­al fin­ger­ing chart. The first is the one I’ll hand stu­dents. It cov­ers the more-or-less stan­dard range of the bas­soon (Bb1 — E5), uses only bass and tenor clefs, and includes a dia­gram with key names. The sec­ond, which I’ve dubbed my “Pro” chart, dis­cards the key dia­gram and switch­es to tre­ble clef at the top end. Oh, it also goes up to Bb5 (although I don’t yet have a reli­able fin­ger­ing for A5 — any­body?).

Since Bret has made the dia­grams gen­er­at­ed by his FDB avail­able under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion-Non­Com­mer­cial-Share­Alike 3.0 Unport­ed (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license, I’ve done the same with my charts. Please, take a look and let me know what you think. Is there any­thing I could do to make them eas­i­er to read, eas­i­er to use, or just plain look nicer? Or do you spot any fin­ger­ings that I’ve ren­dered incor­rect­ly?